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Lot 13

"I believe that if an artist has mastered one medium, he can work in the others as well. I paint only when I am in the mood. The colours are always there in my heart, an unseen power in the background drives me to put them down on canvas."

The Bengal School of Art influenced Dasgupta. He painted landscapes that gave full rein to his penchant for nature and its fanciful shapes and colours, with the ocean being an endless source of... "I believe that if an artist has mastered one medium, he can work in the others as well. I paint only when I am in the mood. The colours are always there in my heart, an unseen power in the background drives me to put them down on canvas."

The Bengal School of Art influenced Dasgupta. He painted landscapes that gave full rein to his penchant for nature and its fanciful shapes and colours, with the ocean being an endless source of fascination. Several of his paintings are surrealistic and abstract in his depiction of the teeming life underwater.

A native of Bengal, Dasgupta spent his childhood years in Behrampur. He remembers, "My parents did not want me to be an artist. It was considered a waste of time. Boys were discouraged. But I was not interested in school, and after my matriculation I begged my father for money and began painting. Since colours and canvasses were so expensive, I did other part-time jobs."

Despite these obstacles, Dasgupta completed his art education from the Government College of Arts and Crafts, Calcutta, and embarked on a career as a landscape artist. Primarily interested in watercolours, Dasgupta nevertheless painted in other mediums as well. He had to give up oils, when he developed an allergy to turpentine and linseed oil. Thereafter, he took up acrylic. But his preferred medium always remained watercolour.

Moving slowly, but surely, from realistic images to the completely abstract, Dasgupta used textural changes and sharp-defined colour schemes, making his landscapes come alive with shifting shapes and barely visible forms.

A world submerged in grey, black and blue, Bimalda (as he was fondly known) felt his canvases were an extension of his mind. "My choice of colours was dictated by the themes I chose to paint," he once told a close friend. The liberal use of blues and the merging of greys and blacks were the natural outcome of the submarine world he portrayed. Through these sombre hues, a ray of bright yellow flashes, illuminating the whole painting and revealing the hidden meanings embedded in his work.

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